Knox: A Stepbrother Romance (A Standalone Stepbrother Romance Novella) Read online

  And kiss they did.

  Chapter 4 or...

  Where the truth lies.

  Knox, contrary to everyone’s expectations, did not return to where he had come from. Coming for his father’s wedding was one side of the coin of truth, the other, the fact he had used all of the rest of his money to do so, buy the suit, a hotel for the night and a meagre present. He had, much like his father a few months before, lost his job. In fact, he’d lost it almost a year before, scraping along and making do with odd modelling assignments and bit part acting roles that had all but dried up in the face of a sweeping crisis in the film industry at the tail end of a recession. Knox had gone to California initially to pursue a dream as an actor and screenwriter, and ended up like almost everyone else, working in a bar to make ends meet. After the wedding, he didn’t seem to be in any rush to head back, mostly because he didn’t have enough money to do so. He said a break from the frontline would be a good thing to get his head together, and besides which, he hadn’t seen his father for a long time, Cory never having enough money to make the long journey out there, so it would be a good chance for them to catch up on lost time. My mom saw it as a perfect opportunity for us to spend some quality time together, and for the reasons I have already mentioned, I had absolutely no objections. I was smart enough to know that even if I couldn’t touch, I could definitely look. If you live with someone, that opens up a whole realm of possibilities. Accidentally catching someone in a compromising position, seeing someone in the shower when you shouldn’t, late night games of strip poker... You get the idea.

  When Knox mentioned it, none of us had any objections.

  You may think a guy without money isn’t appealing, right? Like in order to be sexy and attractive they have to be billionaires with fast cars and stacks of cash in the bank. Well real love doesn’t work like that, and I’m a simple girl. Money can’t buy you looks, no matter what the best cosmetic surgeons in the world say. It can’t buy you charisma, sexiness, personality and nor can it buy you the best thing of all, the secret formula that makes the most fuckable of people exactly that, the most fuckable. That secret ingredient that brings two people together like magnets. The one problem I had with Knox, was that the force that was pushing us apart, the fact we were now, legally speaking, and in the eyes of God step brother and sister, was stronger than the one pulling us together. Or at least the one pulling me towards him. I still had no idea how he felt about me, but deciding to stick around was definitely a step in the right direction, if you can excuse the pun.

  Therefore, almost immediately after the wedding, some eighteen months after my father decided enough was enough, I got a new step dad and a new step brother to boot, and while Mr Perfect made himself at home upstairs, his myriad lotions and potions stacked up on the bedside table like religious ornaments, Knox was given the sofa downstairs until the small room across the hallway from mine could be turned back into a bedroom from a office.

  It was fine. Look but don’t touch. I could do that. I could have done it a lot more easily too if Knox hadn’t been so tempting.

  We never spoke about that first night in the bar at the wedding. It wasn’t until a few weeks later that he brought it up, one night when Mom and Cory had gone out for dinner, and we had the house to ourselves. It had been building up like a pressure cooker and I know I wasn’t the only one to sense it. Stolen looks across the table, electricity practically fizzing between us like firing neurons. The ridiculous attempts to impress each other, mine always a little more obvious than his, although I never got the chance to walk around with my top off. It might have worked had I done so. I wonder how much Mom and Cory knew then. I wonder how much they saw it coming.

  I wanted to feel it pass, like a wave going over sand and dragging all of the rocks back out to the sea to be lost again in that vast expanse of nothing. I would keep myself awake at night pretending it wasn’t real, cursing myself for being distracted by something that could never be reciprocated. I’d go to sleep trying to hate him and wake up apologizing in case I’d jinxed any possibly we ever had of being together. Reliving it now makes it all sound so ridiculous. There was no reason for my attraction to him, but each day that it passed it got stronger and stronger. I tried to find a rationalisation in the fact that us being step siblings, and therefore unable to be together was what was making me want him more than anything else, but this seemed like the reason we weren’t together, not the reason I wanted us to be. No-one else saw it either, that’s what convinced me of its uniqueness. Of its importance. My friends agreed he was handsome, but nothing they hadn’t seen anywhere else. They thought he lacked ambition, was easily distracted, lazy even, where I saw creativity and dark, brooding emotional perfection. I could look at Knox sometimes and think I was staring at the black waves I wanted to wash the feelings away, except he kept bringing rocks out to me and each time I looked they weighed me down more with what I felt like I needed. As each day passed and Knox and I found ourselves spending more time together, laughing and joking and flirting outrageously with each other in the confines of what was deemed acceptable in the already marked and never to be moved boundaries of our enforced relationship, I fell more and more in love with him. I found that love, the love that had started out as a shadow of a suggestion in the bar that night before the wedding, saw the shape of it, recognised it for what it was and realized in that time that I’d either have to do something about it and take it on, reshape it according to the desires of us both or I’d have to forget about changing it and live with it as it was. I needed to know how Knox felt. I needed to know the real reason why he stayed.

  Chapter 5 or...

  That night, where fate fucked me over.

  Being in love with anyone is difficult when that love has grown absent of their understanding of it. This is complicated when the object of that love is someone you have been told, either morally or legally, that you shouldn’t be in love with. Love also knows many forms and sometimes we get confused by the different kind of loves that we feel. Let me be clear here. This is not one of those cases. The love that I feel for Knox is the kind of love that gets my panties wet in seconds, makes my whole body buzz with excitement, causes my skin to break out in goosebumps, and makes me want to tear his clothes off and have him do horrible and disgusting things to me. Some people might call this lust, and I’d probably agree with them if my desire for Knox wasn’t just centred around fucking, or being fucked. Everything about him does it for me. For the first time in my life, he makes me want to give him a child, and that is not normal for me. Some people might say that it’s not normal at all after less than a month, in fact lots of people already have done anonymously in internet chat rooms or not so anonymously on facebook threads, but do you know what? Fuck those people, that’s what I say. If Knox makes me want to be the mother of his children in little other way than just being the person that he is, I feel like I should pay attention to it. Whether the fact that he’s now my stepbrother and I can’t have him ties into that, well that’s another question entirely.

  Knox was sat in the curve of the sofa that used to be my dad’s resting place. I touched a cold beer on his shoulder to knock him out of whatever was distracting him - the weight of what was coming? - and a moment later he took it, his fingers for a fleeting moment I’ve replayed a thousand times, brushing lightly across mine. It’s the moments like those that make you realise what it is you have. It was never in his kiss. The song got it wrong. It was in the bits in between. The space between heartbeats, the absence of touch, the soft crush of desire at the end of a stolen breath. .

  It’s incredible how at home he looked, sunk into the dent my dad had spent his whole life creating. Cory had settled in like he was always meant to be there as well, like my dad never was. I perched on the edge of the arm chair that faced him, my knees up so only the tips of my toes touched the ground. Knox was wearing one of my favourite T-shirts. It was tight enough to show off the defined muscles of his arms, muscles he never seemed t
o work on maintaining but happened to always be there no matter what, and simple enough not to reveal the magic of what lay beyond. The taut muscles of his chest, the perfect spread of hair, the belly button and ribbed abs to die for. ‘The way to paradise’ they call the curved edge of muscle above the pubic area that sticks so perfectly above a pair of jeans. My mind, lost in it.

  I could feel the electricity between us, hotter than ever. I could tell that that night was the night that something could have happened between us, if we both let it. I wanted to talk about how I felt, but I didn’t know how to. I’d rehearsed it a million times, each one leading to us falling into bed together, and when I did it at night time, one hand between my legs because the excitement of the fantasy was too much to bear just stood there in front of the mirror, playing both parts, it always went smoothly, and he always put his finger on my lips at the time I was about to confess all and said, “shhh, don’t talk, I know how you feel, I feel that way too”, my hand in his pressed against his beating heart.

  But each time I tried to bring it up, each time the situation presented itself for real, I got blocked. I got shouted down by myself, by an internal voice that said, ‘don’t be ridiculous, he’s going to laugh at you, he doesn’t feel the same way at all’, that devil perched on my own bed, breaking into my fantasy.

  We talked about nothing, and I felt like we were talking around a subject that both of us felt like we wanted to broach. We finished our beers and drank another. I changed places and sat with him on the sofa, the alcohol giving my courage a much needed lift. I couldn’t be held back by my desires for much longer, it was ready to explode inside me.

  “Knox”

  My voice caught in my throat. My chest felt lumpy, like badly made custard. Like I’d swallowed bricks. I could hear the blood swelling and pumping through my ears, adrenaline pricked, my senses on high alert. These are the moments that make a person’s life. These are the milestones that fate serves us, or at least the ones we incline ourselves to attribute to it. I’m not an expert in matters of the heart, chemistry, science or the body. All I know is myself. All I know is what makes me and what that means is more important than anything else.

  “We can’t Alice”, Knox said, his eyes darkening to betray him. “You know we can’t.”

  My arm caught his elbow as he got up. Or his caught mine, or time snagged on fate’s hook and the world spun just for a moment. We stood there face to face, pressed tight, escape not an option, even though it burned inside him as much as desire burned in me.

  “I know you want me.”

  “That’s not the point.”

  “Look at me. Knox, look at me, please.”

  I’m not a romantic. I’m not that girl who finds herself in these situations and knows the plays of this position intricately. I’m not used to games and I don’t play them well, especially of this kind. Tears left marks on my skin and salt at the edge of my mouth. If I thought we had any left, I’d have said time stood still for just a moment. An impossible decision, but not mine to take any more. My soul was bared. I’d looked fate directly in the eyes, and fate had looked back with pity and pulled the rocks of what could have been, all the way back into the void of nothingness. Emptiness greeted my hand. The space between them where his fingers had been only moments before, mocking me in its insignificance.

  “We can’t Alice”, he said. He didn’t say, “I don’t want to.”

  Chapter 6 or...

  Meet my demons.

  Knox is a complication. After the night of throwing myself at him, which I have described in relentlessly accurate detail in order to give you the full effect of what happened - I intend not to spare my blushes because I want you to see the true purity of my aching love for a step-brother I knew little more than a pair of brand new sneakers - Knox disappeared. Had he not, which is exactly what I needed at that time, I would have done. I had wounds I needed to heal and it felt like the longer he was away, and indeed the further away he was, the easier they would be to heal. Common sense and the majesty of logic is a complete fucking idiot sometimes. Whoever said absence makes the heart grow fonder knew exactly what they were talking about, and then some. Absence of the object of one’s desire makes people do stupid things. I did a stupid thing. Knox doesn’t know. Perhaps he did the very same to make himself realise what it was he truly wanted. I fucked someone. I went out, I found someone, I let them take me home, and with my eyes closed and my heart and legs open, I let them slide themselves inside me while I pretended they were Knox. If this was what it had to be, if this was where it had to end, and I had to begin moving on, so be it. It wasn’t too bad. Depressing as hell, but sex sometimes is. Life too. Damn, happiness has it’s roots in chaos and desperation, no? Isn’t that what we expect as women? Please your man, let him control you. Isn’t that what we are told? Life isn’t fair after all, Alice. You never get what you want.

  A weekend turned into a week and a week into two. Time ticked on. Life got back to normal, or normal enough as much as it is for me. I spent every waking moment as nervous as a bunny in hunting season waiting for any kind of news, good or bad, and every sleeping moment in various stages of the Kama Sutra, Knox’s face losing clarity dream by dream. At the end, what started as a fantasy turned into the mush of hope soured by standing reason.

  “Free spirit”, Cory said of his itinerant son. “You can’t trust actors. Even when they are here, they’re not really here, you know what I mean? Always thinking about something else, some kind of performance. He was like that as a kid, horsing around constantly, the biggest liar I think I’ve ever met. Knox would lie about what color his eyes were, even though you were standing there looking straight at them. Convincing he was too, almost got the impression he’d convinced himself.”

  “I don’t like the name Knox”, Mom butted in. “Sounds like a puzzle of some sort.”

  “Well that’d be right. That kid’s a puzzle for sure. Never settles himself in one place. Always been the same. If I had it, I’d give the one who figured him out a million bucks just to let me in on the secret. I’m surprised he didn’t tell you where he was going, I’m not at all surprised he didn’t tell me, but you two seem like you are tight. He’s just got worse after his mother passed.”

  “I always wanted a brother”, I said.

  “I can see how similar you two are”, Mr Perfect said with a smile, as though a thought he’d had previously was finally being given the recognition it always deserved. “That’s fate, that is. That’s what brought your mother and I together. Fate gave you the brother you always wanted. Fate brought Knox to your door.”

  Mom seemed happy. She was cooking a lot more, or baking really. She seemed to be baking constantly. Biscuits, brownies, cookies, cakes, croissants, bread rolls. Every day the kitchen seemed to be filled with a different sweet bready smell and we began to go through more flour, sugar and butter than an average American family would use in a year. She was making so much we couldn’t get rid of it. Half of the stuff she either had to take to neighbors, give away to reluctant work colleagues or dump in the trash.

  Enough time had passed for me to realise Cory wasn’t going anywhere. He seemed like the real deal, even though his collection of ex-wives might suggest otherwise. The fact that recognising qualities in others is easier if you share that quality yourself made me believe that it might have even been possible, in the somewhat strange world I now found myself living in, that he either loved her or was seriously beginning to do so. I have, for the entirety of my life, maintained a strange relationship with my mother. It is for this reason that I cannot say unequivocally that she was truly happy. If not, she was demonstrating a convincing portrayal of one. In keeping with her always rabid verbal diarrhea, she certainly liked to say she was.

  Cory wasn’t without his demons of course, and I don’t just mean his obsession with fake tan and skin darkening products. He’d lost his wife in a horrible car accident, and the legal implications of her death hadn’t all entirely been dealt w
ith. She was in quite severe debt when she kicked the snow filled bucket, and Cory was the one who that debt was passed on to. He also seemed to have a number of issues sleeping, whether this was as a direct result of the issue with his ex-wife or not, and quite complex problems of another kind. He had absolutely no money, and didn’t really seem all that bothered about changing his employment status to do anything about it. He was sponging quite literally from Mom, sponge caking if you will, and the little money Mom had squirrelled away was being pinched from a number of different angles. Mom still had her job, and what she did with her own money, especially after the college fund spending spree my father partook in, I knew was largely out of my control. I had my part time position, enough money coming in to save a chunk of change for myself and little interest in her financial affairs as long as she was happy. In the back of my mind however, I saw Cory taking so many slices of the multitudinous cakes Mom spent half her spare time making that one day she’d be left picking crumbs off the floor, while Mr Perfect, after one last final application of medical grade tanning cream, did a runner like his one and only son. I was angrier than I thought. I had no right to be angry at him, but I was mad he didn’t have the balls to take what he wanted. What was there to lose? Who was he protecting? Fuck morality. We were not blood relatives. What the fuck was stopping him?

  For a month I ate cinnamon buns and flatbreads. I lost myself in scones and organic rye loaves. I watched Mom to see if the vinyl would crack and heard Cory take care of his demons. Most of all I waited. I waited so long I thought the feeling would consume me and turn me into stone.

  “You miss your brother”, Mom would say. “Have another sponge finger.”